Business Desk, ETV Bharat: Taking a step further to boost digital payments, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Friday announced that that Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) payment system will be available round the clock from December this year.
While announcing the October monetary policy review outcome, RBI governor Shaktikanta Das said: “India will be among very few countries globally with a 24x7x365 large value real time payment system. This will facilitate innovations in the large value payments ecosystem and promote ease of doing business.”
Currently, the RTGS service window for customer transactions is available to banks from 7 am to 6 pm on a working day, for settlement at the RBI end. However, the timings that the banks follow may vary from bank to bank.
To recall, in December 2019, RBI had made available the National Electronic Funds Transfer (NEFT) system on a 24x7x365 basis as well.
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RTGS and NEFT mainly differ from each other on two fronts. One, there is no ceiling on the minimum or maximum amount that can be transferred through NEFT. You can even transfer Re 1.
However, the minimum amount that can be sent via RTGS is Rs 2 lakh. Banks have the liberty to decide their own upper limit as RBI has not set any ceiling cap for this mode.
Two, in RTGS, money transfer is immediate and on real-time basis, whereas NEFT transactions are settled in hourly batches. It means that if you initiate a NEFT transfer after the settlement time of one batch, you have to wait for the next settlement time for the transaction to be processed.
When using RTGS funds transfer service, customer needs to provide details like amount to be remitted, beneficiary’s s account number, name of the beneficiary bank and branch, name of the beneficiary and the IFSC code of the receiving branch.
